not a gun violence statistic (there was another horrific shooting last night :'( )

but a career outcomes and pay inequality statistic

it’s making me miserable thinking about it, so maybe stop? just enjoy what i’m doing without comparing to others? it’s way more reasonable to contribute to structural fixes rather than proscribe my life choices by some arbitrary if-things-didn’t-go-wrong / how-things-could’ve-gone-better arbitrary yardstick. (grad school has been miserable)

things that are stressing me out right now:

being behind schedule for writing and submitting papers, with minimal progress toward doing so. doing minimal technical work (like even opening jupyter notebooks basically) for the last month. it’s been almost a year switching labs and I’ve gotten no real coding done >:0

being behind schedule for even my own goals – eg learning Chinese. I spend a decent amount of time but it seems hard to even stick anything now that I’m up in the 2000 range, and it’s depressing to be stuck in the 840 unknown characters since I took down the new cards/day since it was taking so much time each day. (maybe time to switch it up again? accept fewer reviews and more new cards, not efficient but more fun). i’m even starting to doubt hanzi i’ve known since a kid, like I looked at 活 once and didn’t recognize it…

my duckietown purchase (for the autonomous vehicles mooc) will arrive in a week, looking forward but also stressed about spending money on spurious things. plus it reminds me of my total failure of combining hardware with online education. (though this did take 3-4 years and multiple UROPs and institutions working on it)

https://www.edx.org/course/self-driving-cars-with-duckietown